The next evolution for an environmentally-oriented Minneapolis vintage shop is playing out this spring as Junket: Tossed & Found prepares to reduce its square footage by 25% to welcome a new non-profit restaurant into the building. The shop’s owner, Julie Kearns, cited the change as a strategic decision to bring food to a community that’s been clamoring for more walkable options.

Kearns and Junket are also now leveraging the upcoming change in floor plans to involve their community in establishing a carbon-informed retail assortment. The goal: to combine the ease of traditional retail with the environmental virtue of a thrift store.

In order to help her customers better understand the specific environmental benefits of reuse – and to better understand them, herself – Kearns contracted with Minneapolis based Ecotone Analytics, GBC in 2015 to begin tracking carbon dioxide emissions avoided by consumers who purchased the shop’s products instead of making similar new purchases.

To the best of Kearns’ knowledge, Junket is the only retailer in the country undertaking such product-specific analysis, approaching the project with consumer cognition in mind while documenting weights and materiality of items as small and discrete as paper clips.

Two years later, she’s reached a data-driven conclusion: there’s no environmentally virtuous alternative to reuse, period.

Kearns has enlisted Minneapolis-based B-Corp Software For Good to begin prototyping a technical tool to enable a social supply chain for reused goods. She has also launched a Kickstarter campaign to finalize the business model before directing her full attention upstream.

“Junket is committed to serving as a community resource and force for good,” said Kearns. “We’re working to provide high quality ease of access to the most sustainable goods possible: those that already exist.”

Junket: Tossed & Found is a for-profit social enterprise working to connect the dots between climate disruption and human behavior — and to create social change through retail innovation in the reuse sector.

Junket’s brick and mortar location (which opened in late 2012 in South Minneapolis) is equal parts reuse bastion, science experiment, and community treasure (though most people still think of it as an overgrown vintage shop).

This remanufacture/reuse-in-replication off-shoot of Junket’s retail organization is using ‘keep carbon in the ground’ as a design constraint in marrying secondhand goods with both the power of crowdsourcing and with scalable supply chain and production strategies. We are in early stage development and currently testing the product concept via Junket’s sales channels. We welcome opportunities to collaborate and involve others. For general information about Mostly, please sign up here. For immediate press inquiries, please reach out to Julie directly at 612-309-0524.

Julie has a brain that doesn’t shut off. Driven to turn trauma and loss into possibility after her personal life imploded abruptly in early 2009, she set out to find a solution to ensure that her family’s needs would be met – and made a point to ensure that any solution would also solve problems for others. Junket was the result of that mission. More recently, Mostly has emerged, as well.

In addition to her entrepreneurial chops, Julie is frequently credited with having driven the development of a sustainable shopping corridor along Minnehaha Avenue. This grassroots effort to draw like-minded businesses to the area has been repeatedly recognized by city leadership, and resulted in unprecedented growth to a commercial corridor during major road reconstruction. Minnehaha emerged from this three-year intrusion/blessing/improvement in late 2016, and now features a dozen businesses marketing collaboratively under a common banner: shops committed to selling reuse/secondhand/upcycled products.

Julie has an obvious passion for solving environmental and social problems, has a well-informed perspective about the interconnected nature of business, environment, and community (and, specifically, the responsibility of the former to not impinge upon the latter two), lives near the shop with her daughter and an elderly six pound Chihuahua, and would welcome any opportunity to talk shop. She can be reached directly at 612-309-0524. Image gallery.